Thesis Title: Of Monsters and Men: Feeling and Identity in Medieval Romance.
Supervisor: Professor Laura Ashe
My DPhil challenges the 'critical commonplace that identity in medieval romance tends to be expressed through action rather than interior psychological exploration' (Saunders, 2002), by highlighting the theoretical problems the concept of 'interiority' presupposes. The history of emotions is a relatively new interdisciplinary field that combines neurology, history, and the social sciences, and it has grown exponentially in the last two decades. Although the novelty of this discipline has led to experimental, often conflicting methodologies for historical analysis, its underlying principle resonates with the longstanding problem Saunders identifies: how can we separate action from feeling, given what we now know about the multifaceted nature of cognitive processes?
This project aims, in part, to foster a new sensitivity to reading emotions in medieval literary sources. I argue that these texts are not 'unfeeling', but instead originate in cultures with different modes of emotional expression to our own, which can make it challenging to recognise. To this end, I explore how feelings can be read through the actions of characters, and how this impacts our understanding of the narratives. Moreover, by identifying the emotional potential within the conflicting actions, decisions, and practices of various characters, we garner a better understanding of how their identities interact to construct these stories.
This project also explores the problems with applying historical methods to literary analysis. Certain methodologies adapted from the history of emotions will be more or less valuable to the literary critic, given the fictionality of romance. By developing this method for reading emotions in medieval literary texts, I aim to distinguish the concepts, principles, and approaches to source analysis that are transferrable, and those which have less currency across disciplinary borders.